Not Metal

Coming to a Midwest town near you.

Well, not all over the Midwest, but pretty much. Serpentcult, The Gates of Slumber, and Zoroaster are on the bill. All kind of suck in my opinion. Zoroaster has some pretty good jams, nothing that really grabs me in the stoner sludge doom grip that say, Electric Wizard or High On Fire can.

Serpentcults singer oozes gimmick.  I don’t care if it’s the bassists wife or the bands’ former groupie-turned-roadie-turned-friend-turned-singer.  Her range isn’t even close to the Dio-level that she try’s to reach.

Gates Of Slumber gets points for looking exactly like what a bunch of bald, overweight metal heads should look like, but there records just don’t reach me.

Regardless of my rambling shit talk about bands I hardly know past 3 songs each, the tour kicks off at the Empty Bottle in Chicago (the tour poster says Metal Shakers, this is a lie).

To me, Suicidal Tendencies is one of the seminal speed/thrash bands. I love them. That’s why I am always excited when I hear they have new material coming out. Unfortunately for me, for damn near a decade now, that excitement is unwarranted; their newer material just isn’t as good as their late 80s-early 90s releases.

They are slated to release a new album later in the year, but if this vid for “Come Alive” is any indication as to the quality of all the new material, then this upcoming album doesn’t offer much to be excited about. The leads are frenetic and fierce, but the song as a whole is unimpressive and nowhere near the standard they set for themselves early on in their career.

A bootleg exclusive

“A Selection Unnatural”

Revolver Mag has the scoop on the themes from the forthcoming album “Deflorate”, due out September 15 on Metal Blade. The new song pretty much sounds like what you would expect from these guys, and the replacement guitarist (who plays in Arsis) sounds like an excellent replacement for the last dude whos name I can’t remember. Anyway, check out the new shit here!

BleaarrRGHH!!

Tasty hardcore riffage.

There’s a lot of metal out there to discover, and this band is one in particular I had never gotten around to checking out. Until now. If these new songs (*streaming on their myspace) are anything like their previous records, consider me a fan. This is some of the heaviest, grinding, brutal, and catchy (gasp!) riffs packed into just these two songs. The mid-paced sliding riff around 2:02 on “F-Unit” is just so good. That good. I’m looking forward to the full album available in August.

Now to go discover their older albums…

Mastodon

Crack The Skye

I love Mastodon’s music, ever since I picked up Remission after seeing a dude’s t-shirt with the “horsesplosion” art. I’ve dug what they do. But…

I wasn’t excited about this album at all before it came out. Maybe I’d listened to Blood Mountain a little too much, maybe because I hadn’t been listening to nearly as much metal as I had over the last two and a half years, or maybe it was because Brendan O’Brian was involved. Whatever it may have been, this album was hanging out in the “I’ll get to it whenever, its on the list, but its not a priority” zone and it was not moving off it anytime soon.

Then the rumors about the album being about Rasputin and some other shit and the album went onto the “God I hope this doesn’t turn into a Mars Volta thing” list. The only other album on the list is the next Mars Volta album. And that list is well below the list in the above paragraph.

Then the album art came out. All I saw at the time was “Tonight! At the Planetarium! Lazer Metal!” It wasn’t as iconic as the previous records and I wasn’t pleased. I know what I liked, and I liked old Mastodon. I feared the worst. My shrunken penis was conferring with an underused mattress and they feared the worst.
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Not lolcats. Just The Cat’s Pajamas

This will be hotter than emo crunk.

I don’t know if I “get” this band. Their schtick is kind of cool? “Putting the gay into metal.” Hah hah? What?

Somewhat unique I suppose. I honestly liked their self-titled EP. The spacey atmosphere they melded into the songs were my favorite parts. I distinctly remember playing the EP on repeat for about 50 times a day for a week. But, that love interest lasted no longer than that single week. Since then, I’ve forgotten they even were making a full length until I saw the post today on metalsucks.

If you ask me, if they keep up the nintendo-roboto keys and Evanescence-esque clean vokills, this band will have multiple t-shirts at your local hot topic with a fan base of mall core kids buying their merch within the weeks following the release of this new album. Not to mention they have the strength of a major label like Century Media backing it up.

Check out the new song streaming here if you care.

Constitutional Masturbation

Sounds sexy.

I gotta be honest and say I’ve never actually heard anything by this band. Never really cared that much. This is mostly due to their “so funny I forgot to laugh ironic but not really and just comes across as stupid”, band name. First impressions are a bitch. And these guys sounds like a combination of Cattle Decapitation and The Black Dahlia Murder. Two bands who, in my opinion, get the job done better (no pun intended). So why waste time on another marginal “death metal” band? Well, this song gets me with the slower riffing. I dig the brutal…slow…grind stuff the most in this song. Though, after that there isn’t much else that you probably haven’t heard already from 1000 other bands.

If you care to hear, do so before the video is removed for violating copyright laws or some shit.

UPDATE 5-2-09 – You’re shit out of luck. The song has been taken down. You’ll have to wait until the record leaks to download it.

New EP announced for May 5 release

Yay!

We were as delightfully surprised as the Metalsucks crew about the news of new Nachtmystium material soon to be unleashed upon us. This band has come a long way with their sound with last years’ awesome Assassins. We wait now with bated breath.
Check it out here